I was screaming before I really knew what had hit me. The lantern fell from my hands like a comet released from Heaven. Everywhere its light touched, it burned, as though I’d just walked into the jaws of a magmadroth or fallen into a lake of acid. I flapped wildly, bending backwards, away from the pain, until I fell over and from there curled onto my side. That only made it worse, exposing the entirety of my back to the light. Batting about blindly behind me, I found the lantern. My fingers closed over the handle and my first instinct was to hurl it as hard and as far from me as I could, but I fought it down, suffering the extra seconds of agony I needed to manipulate the catches and slide it shut.
The light snuffed out, and I slumped to the floor, gasping and breathless, steam curling off my reddened skin. A rainbow of weird and wonderful colours blurred across my eyes as I shifted to look accusingly at the lantern in my hand.
‘Ikrit! I’m going to strangle you with your own tail!’
I lay as I was for about a minute before I felt as though I’d mustered enough strength to stand. I may have been a little unsteady, but for better or worse the lantern had at least burned away some of the memories that had been fogging up my thoughts.
I cast a glance in the direction of Sigendil, the beacon star, dimly visible in the uncanny pseudo-realm that Ikrit’s warrens comprised.
I felt as though it was mocking me.
‘Is that the best you can do, a direction?’
Sigmar does answer prayers, but more often than not I am the answer. I should have known better than to expect more, but my experience on Ikrit’s Anvil had shaken me to my core. There have been many times over the years when men and women like you have asked me ‘where was Sigmar when this, that, or the other apocalypse fell?’ The answer is that while Sigmar might intercede on our behalf less than we might like, I assure you that he does so far more often than you think. He is simply subtle about it. We would all love to see Sigmar smiting his own enemies so that the likes of you and I do not have to, but if the God-King were to take to the field today, then tomorrow it would be Khorne, and the day after that we would all be wishing he had remained in Sigmaron ignoring our prayers.
I was bitter and hurting, however, and none of that was of any consolation. In spite of everything, though, I held onto the lantern. Whatever Ikrit had done to it, it was still a part of me, a part of Sigmar – and if push came to shove I could still hit something with it.
A rumble passed through the rock walls as I stumbled through the open door, the tables behind me rattling amidst the piled rubbish. Dust drizzled on me from the ceiling of the passage outside as I fled back for the common tunnels. Freed of the incessant distraction of lost memories filling my head in response to every little thing, finding the beast camp from Ikrit’s warrens was simplicity itself, like tracking back to a campfire after relieving yourself in the woods.
Don’t try that in the Gorwood though, just a little friendly advice.
I frowned at the unexpected, if not unwelcome, sight.
Where I’d been expecting to see a large cavern filled with the hide yurts and dung fires of cavorting beastmen, it was now… well, it was still a large cavern filled with hide yurts and dung fires, but it was as though a stampeding herd of ghroxen had just gone over it. The straight gouge of flattened tents and scattered fires went directly towards a wide tunnel, angled steeply downwards. I could smell the cooler, fresher air blowing from the mouth of it. I knew that it couldn’t have made much of a difference to the abusive stink of the beast camp, but to me, then, it smelled like the Stromfels after the first snows.
‘That’s the way out, then.’
A few of the dung fires to either side still flickered damply, fallen poles and lines casting wretched shadows that crawled over the cavern’s walls. I checked over my shoulder as I walked past a small tent, and almost rounded on it, lantern raised like a stone club, when what I would have later sworn was a shadow crept through the flap. The flaps never even rustled in the breeze though, and by the time I had my lantern up to brain the thing the firelight had moved on and there was no shadow there at all. I laughed hollowly. The echoes made it sound as though a few score men shared my black humour and that cheered me somewhat. Even so, I found myself scratching the burnt skin at the back of my neck, as though I were being watched, clutching my lantern close as I started walking for the tunnel.
If I’d run, maybe things would have been different.
Chapter eleven
I ploughed near naked into the thick snow, like a wild gryph-charger into icy surf. It was packed up to my knees, forcing me to wade as I pushed myself on into the freezing cold. From the severity of the sudden incline and the sharpness of the air, I gathered that I was somewhere high on the side of a mountain. Knight-Venator Barbarus and the other winged scouts I had despatched into the Nevermarsh had never reported any mountainous regions, but it was a vast landscape. That’s why it was called the Nevermarsh. I think it was the Vanguard-Raptor, Illyrius, who had first named it that, complaining to me that it ‘never ends.’ I faced up to the grim likelihood that I was a long way from the Seven Words as I slipped and skidded on down the mountainside, snow flurrying about my bare chest and wild mane like nipping white birds with a numbing poison in their claws. I had no idea of where I was going. No hope of getting there before I froze to death, anyway. But I am Hamilcar Bear-Eater, King of the Eternal Winterlands, and I wasn’t about to let something like that slow me down.
Shadows prickled at the flurrying snow ahead of me. Barren trees, clinging to the lower slopes of the summit like frozen candelabra with their crooked branches bent towards the sky. I struggled towards them, thinking that shelter from the blizzard might keep me going for a few minutes longer at least, long enough to think of an actual plan if I could just get my head out of the wind, although even to me that seemed unlikely. It’s easy to laugh off the inevitable when there’s an army behind you. It’s just as easy to do it without one, of course; it’s just pointless. No, realism was the order of the day. I was going to die on that mountain, and I was determined to do it as far away from the skaven lair as I possibly could. It was conceivable that one of Ikrit’s minions or Kurzog’s beastmen might stumble across me before I froze to death and I wanted to fend off the possibility for as long as I could.
Keeping half an eye alert, I watched the flurrying snow for any sign of Ikrit’s clanrats or the Blind Herd. They had almost certainly left by the same tunnel I had, but there was no sign of them anyway. Given the conditions, however, that meant little. I had no way of knowing how big a head start they had over me and with snow coming down the way it was, two hundred beastmen could have been coming straight at me in tuskgor chariots with bells on the wheels and I wouldn’t have known about it until they were trampling over me.
With a teeth-chattering growl, I barrelled on towards the trees.
I’d rather go out to a beastman’s hatchet than the cold anyway. It’d be quicker, and quicker better suited my preferences just then.
Up close, the trees were gnarled and horribly twisted things, clad not in bark but something that looked like ice. I couldn’t tell if they were even alive at all but, accustomed as I was to the hostile flora of the Gorwood, I made sure to keep my distance. Unlike the honey traps of the Gorkomon’s leechwood pines and carniferns that would lure anything with warm blood and a pulse onto their roots, these twisted runts hardly invited my approach. They emanated a cold so piercing that I had to check my fingers to be certain that they hadn’t been cut on it, and even seemed to shun each other’s company, their branches angling sharply to avoid encroaching on another’s canopy.